


hummingbird heart / soldier side

by mahkent



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Medical Torture, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 21:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16145756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahkent/pseuds/mahkent
Summary: Plead to your god, little hummingbird boy.





	1. hummingbird heart

Heart thump-thump-thumping in your chest, it splits and breaks through your bird bones. Dry and cracked and splintering in the cold night air. Hummingbird heart in your chest, it shatters every other second then reforms and shatters again, an endless rhythm that has your breath stuttering and fire burning through your throat. Feel the heat ravaging your body and feel your muscles ache.

You aren’t sure why you run. Hummingbird heart in your chest, it sparks and thrums a beat you can’t escape but damnit, you try. The slap of the soles of your shoes on the pavement. Arms tucked to your side and your head tucked low, you dart through crowds until they dissipate into one person for every mile you run, then less, then none. You’re alone in the night sky. The warm air rushes past your ears even though your hummingbird heartbeats are like gunshots in your ears. 

Quick-quick-quick the movement of your legs, propelling you forward into the dark night. What are you afraid of? What do you run from? The questions run from your head, hot oil spilling away and splattering behind you, the thoughts slipping away with every drop of sweat that hits the ground behind you. Leave it behind in the night. Leave the fear and the anxiety and become one with your pounding heart.

Dissolve into nothingness. You exist to run, consuming the miles and miles with legs that burn from exertion. Dissolve into hot air in your lungs and throat and the pounding in your ears. Dissolve into someone that no one can catch because you’re far too fast for them. Slip out of the grasp of emotions or financial troubles or the fact that you’ve been drafted, damnit, you’re the first boy to be drafted in your family. Your mother is sobbing into your elder brother’s chest while you escape your problems.

The air burns in your nose. Down through your chest, feeding the pounding in your ears and making every breath ache, you’re going too fast. Too hard. Your stamina can’t keep up but you keep forcing yourself forward, forward, away from your sobbing mother and grieving brothers. Escape. Finally stop when you’re miles from anyone you know, stand on the edge of a tunnel overhang in the part of town your mom made you promise you wouldn’t go to. 

Sit on the edge of that tunnel overhang. Dangle your feet over the river rushing through the tunnel, running just as fast as you were. Breathe in the mist splashing up from it. Watch the moon in the sky hide behind the clouds as the sun rises, lifting its weary head up from the ground. Feel the sweat dry on your skin and cool down your ravaged body.

Think for one moment about what you’ve done. You left your mother and your brothers sobbing in the kitchen. You ran from the crowded room, slipping out even as Finn called your name in concern, you ran as fast as you could. Your hummingbird heart, it sped up with the anxiety bubbling in your chest, a watched pot bubbling over until your body is filled with the nerves. War. It’s war, damnit, something you’re terrified by and terrified of being drafted into.

Why you? Why you when your brothers are so much more fit for battle? It’s an awful thought, but you think they’d be better choices. They aren’t the runt. They aren’t the small one who hid behind his brother’s legs for so long when he was little, they aren’t the frail one who’s only good at track which isn’t even a real sport to most people. Why you? You’re terrified of war. Your hummingbird heart goes into overdrive when you’re cornered at school; it’d burst right out of your chest if you were being shot at.

Your hummingbird heart thrums in your chest. The night air doesn’t burn in your throat anymore, but your body burns with shame and anxiety. At home your mother and your brothers wait for you- you have to go back, you know, but you can’t. Not right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two short stories for a character i made. love that guy.


	2. soldier side

Feel the air in your lungs, little boy, feel it burn. Ripped away by chains and thorns and thistles. Torn from your lungs splayed open on the table. Feel hands in them. Feel the fiber of your chest hardening then cracking then being peeled away.

Inch closer to the abyss, little boy. Darkness peeling your thoughts away one by one. Remember your mother sobbing as you held her, your nose buried in her hair because you knew you wouldn’t be able to so much as speak to her for however long this damned war takes. The goddamned war that you don’t even know much about. You’re going to Korea, maybe? Maybe? You read the paper and it sounded as if you were going to fight something else. Something inhuman.

Grease kept your hair slicked back because you wanted to look like you weren’t a terrified child. The hummingbird heart in your chest thrumming a rhythm that made you want to run so, so bad, you kept your face impassive and your spine straight as you walked to the place they told you. Some tiny backalley house barely even standing, you knock on the door like the paper said. (Two papers came in the mail. One of them you were told not to show, it told you to do a lot of things you don’t think you should. Don’t eat, knock, don’t tell anyone where you’re going- lie if they ask. Don’t bring anyone with you.)

Come back to the present. See with your burning eyes that your lungs are out of your body. See the faceless doctors (monsters) prodding and injecting and feel the white-hot heat in your brain as you lose oxygen. Your hummingbird heart pounds so hard that you’re sure it’s about to burst, but the doctors force more of whatever they have into you. 

Feel your limbs so, so distantly. Lead soaking your limbs and keeping you still. You can’t move, you can’t move, it’s a concept so foreign and so horrifying that claustrophobia sinks its ugly claws into your lungs that you can see. It’s as if you’ve been strapped down, then you realize you have been. Straps on your biceps and wrists, your thighs and calves, one even over your hips to keep you from writhing. Your mouth is free but it doesn’t mean much when how you must be begging doesn’t make them stop.

Acid through your veins. Whatever they’re doing, it spreads through your body and floods you with agony. Howling in your ears- no, it’s screaming, is it you?- and the beep-beep of a machine that must be keeping your heart going. Beep-beep, beep-beep-beep-beep- speeding up until it’s a shrill screech in your ears. You wish you could hear, but it’s all you howling and the screech of the machine.

Until it isn’t. That awful howling crescendos with a burst of wet heat in your lungs as the screeching machine falls silent. The thing is, though- you can feel your heart beating. An ugly pounding in your chest, that hummingbird heart is going faster than you ever thought it could. The machine simply isn’t registering it which should be more concerning to you right now if it weren’t for the wet heat pooling in your chest starting to choke you. 

Plead to your god, little hummingbird boy. Look up to the sky - the ceiling, plain white and so sterile you can taste disinfectant (or maybe that’s the solutions they’re forcing into your pulsing bloodstream) on your tongue - and beg your god with unmoving lips. You know he won’t answer. You don’t believe in the bastard as much as you should, you don’t go to church as much as you should (skipping out on the sermons so you could run, avoid how they’re filled with vitriol and hate and things that Jesus probably wouldn’t do presuming he does even exist) and you sure as hell don’t think that, if you do die on this table, you’ll go to heaven.

Hell would be better than this. At least in hell there would be a reprieve from the needles and injections and absolute agony. There, maybe you’d be able to relax your muscles from the taut leather they are right now, about to snap and leave you utterly useless. Maybe you’d be able to feel the ice cold air (because you’re sure it never says in the bible that the whole thing is fire, just one lake, and anyway the cold is worse than the heat) and feel it cool the sweat slicking your skin. Anything would be better than this full-body heat, smothering and choking you.

Feel the air in your lungs, little boy. Burning again as you’re brought back from the brink, torn away from eternal damnation, feel your hummingbird heart thrumming a rhythm the machines can’t keep up with. Realize how you’ll never have reprieve from this absolute agony. Feel the distance of your god, little boy, and lose all hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soldier side by system of a down.


End file.
